The 13 years since he died
-- of throat cancer perhaps not unrelated to
the cigarettes that filed ceaselessly through his lips —
have been good to Sammy Davis Jr. A four-CD career
retrospective (Rhino's Yes I Can! The Sammy Davis
Jr. Story) came out a few years back; last year, Sammy,
"a new play with music and tap inspired by the life of
Sammy Davis Jr.," toured Britain. The Recording Academy
gave him a Grammy for lifetime achievement, albeit not
within his lifetime. Don Cheadle played him in a TV
movie about the Rat Pack, whose resurgent popularity,
born of cocktail-age nostalgia, continues generally to
surge; and actor-comedian Eddie Griffin (Malcolm and
Eddie, Undercover Brother) has been set to
star in the film based on Davis' twin memoirs, Yes I
Can! and Why Me? Now he is being
celebrated in Sammy in the Sixties: The
Television Work of Sammy Davis Jr., a two-part
program at the Museum of Television & Radio that
catches him, for the most part, at his best, not long
before changing tastes set the singer down the wrong
road to unka-chunka-chicka-boom, Nehru jackets,
leather pants and love beads. (He got funky then and
forgot, for a while, to sing.) Later he hugged Nixon and
recorded "Candy Man," but I remember seeing him in the
late '70s, on The Tonight Show, burning through
"From This Moment On" at a clip that made the Ramones
sound like Vanilla Fudge. His best performances were a
kind of a daredevil act, and like any great daredevil
act felt both dangerous and casual.

Worship, of course, can warp a
reputation as effectively as can disdain. Billy
Crystal's awful, if affectionate, imitation — "Hey,
man" — hangs around in the cultural memory,
half-obscuring its source; it's all many people may
ever know of the man some call Mr. Entertainment. Rat
Packism saddles the art with the "life," and not only
his but that of Frank Sinatra, against whom he is
invariably judged — just as his race ensured he'd
ultimately be reckoned against African-American
performers whose history and interests had nothing to
do with his, and held to account for his processed
hair and manner of speech ("posh," the way Madonna
talks now).

I come, then, not to bury Sammy in
extracurricular particulars, the things by which he is
parodied — a black Jew with a glass eye, a
thrice-broken nose, and an underbite you could launch
jets from; follower of Frank, intimate of Linda
Lovelace — but to praise him as the last practitioner
of a certain brand of stage-based 20th-century
entertainment, wherein a singer might not only dance, but conduct the band,
play the drums, do impressions and perform fast-draw
gun tricks. Having entered show business at an
exceedingly tender age — it was still the 1920s when
he made his stage debut, at 3 — he was one of the last
real vaudevillians, a peer of performers 10 and 20 and
30 years his senior. But it also meant he was young
enough to grasp the new sounds of the swinging '60s
and the more florid expressions of late-period
Broadway, if still too old for psychedelia and all
that came after. Although he apparently dropped a lot
of acid.

The
programs and clips being screened at the
MT&R span the years 1963 to 1966, as Davis neared
and hit 40, though he seems years younger; this was
his peak. He had by then been famous in a big way for
a decade, but the '60s were when he came into his own,
artistically — he had a style for the times, with the
speed and gleam of a sports car — and professionally:
a best-selling autobiography; three Rat Pack movies; a
Tony nomination for Golden Boy, the Broadway
musical created especially for him; a top nightclub
act; a busy recording career; and the effective
American franchise on the songs of Anthony Newley and
Leslie Bricusse — "What Kind of Fool Am I?," "Someone
Nice Like You," "Once in a Lifetime" and a couple
dozen others through the years — songs I would care to
hear no one else on Earth sing, but which became his
signature, and suited not only his taste for the
dramatic, but his existentially conflicted, who-am-I,
why-am-I, eternally questing disposition.

Notwithstanding the odd big-screen
star turn, such as his Sportin' Life in the film of Porgy
and Bess, TV, which in its youth was
essentially electronic vaudeville, was a more
receptive medium for him than film, as it was for
black variety artists in general. As TV's implicit
charge was to reflect and channel the world, most
everything of pop-cultural interest was at some point
fed into it. Davis' own TV career runs from the early
'50s, when on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour host
Eddie Cantor controversially embraced him — Cantor's
response to the ensuing uproar was to book the act for
the rest of the season — until his death in 1990, and
includes Westerns, cop shows, sitcoms (on which he
often but not always played himself), soap operas,
variety hours, anthology dramas, TV movies, talk
shows, awards shows, superstar specials (some of them
his own), Shindig and Hullabaloo and
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. He made a cameo
appearance on Batman. He kissed Archie Bunker.
He co-hosted the Emmys in 1965, the Oscars in 1975,
had his own variety series, The Sammy Davis Jr.
Show, in 1966 — the final episode screens here,
in the "Golden Boy of Broadway" package — and his own
syndicated talk show, Sammy and Company, from
1975 to 1977. He sang the theme to Baretta.

The
years have not been kind to every element of
these shows. His jokes about race relations are a beat
or two behind the times. Some bits, like the fast-draw
gunplay — which is ultimately not so different than
watching a man fly model airplanes — or his
lip-synching to Robert Preston's recording of
"Trouble," are just puzzling now. More troubling is
his famously ostentatious humility; in his eagerness
to please, he can become his own worst enemy — he
mugs, plays cute, puts on a widdle kiddie voice,
laughs too hard or too long. One feels for him.

But when he's working, when
he's really inside a song or a dance, none of that
matters. The BBC's 1963 Meet Sammy Davis Jr.
(part of the museum's "London and More" program) is
the thing to see here. Performing in a tan sport coat
that suits him somehow better than the tux in which
he's elsewhere clad, he is all business and in
terrific form. At ease across the octaves, a master of
melodic leaps and plunges, of long-arc portamento and
the slyly bent note, Davis had a voice variously
redolent of trombone, French horn, tenor and even
baritone saxophone. He was a juicier singer than
Sinatra — if not quite as profound — and a bluesier
one, and a jazzier one, but could marshal as well the
semi-operatic throb and sob of a Mario Lanza. If there
is in his singing, as in the rest of his act, a bit of
the showoff, of Check out what I can do, well,
you know, he could. He phrased like the dancer
he was, syncopating, punctuating, messing with the
pulse. Singing or dancing he seems to be making it up
on the spot, every note, every change from heel to toe
a new possibility. Everything about him said soar:
Not only his songs, but the career they define, and
the life the career defined, are manifestoes of
self-actualization — "Yes I Can," "Gonna Build a
Mountain," "Once in a Lifetime," "A Lot of Livin' To
Do," "I've Gotta Be Me."

"I'm gonna do great things," he sings,
and does.

SAMMY IN THE SIXTIES | "Golden Boy
of Broadway" (through Thursday, February 27) and
"London and More" (Friday, February 28, through
Sunday, April 6) | At the Museum of Television &
Radio, 465 N. Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills | (310)
786-1025